Freedom to Choose One’s Own Health Care

Abstract

Taking care of one's own health belongs to the diversity of the culture and religion. This concerns not only the conventional medical services on the market but also the traditional medicine. When selecting one's own health care, a significant role is played not only by one's personal experience but also by one's worldview or religious beliefs. The methods of health care differ in the degree of reliability of evidence. Various forms of evidence are established by the law of medicinal drugs. Certain restrictions on health care concern livestock in organic farming. In these cases, the law system favors the homeopathic products before the allopathic ones. Freedom to choose one's own health care also concerns natural healing. The Czech law recognizes its practitioners as experts in the private law sense being obliged to act with due care of experts. Natural healing is sometimes associated with religious beliefs. In the Czech Republic there is a constitutional ban on being bound by an exclusive ideology or religion. From the perspective of human rights and biomedicine there is preference of the interests and welfare of human beings to the interests of society or science.